Obama confirms neuroscience is the coolest, most important technology on earth

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Is DNA really the future?

Less than a year ago we were presented with the concept of a connectome, and pondered the vast amounts of data which it would generate. Now the nation, or at least those who care, will witness judgments on the feasibility of storing and processing vastly greater amounts of data generated in a rapid and time-sensitive fashion. Church as yet offers no direction as to which neurons should ideally be targeted first. It is probably a good idea to have at least some inkling as to which circuits you want to map first when you get around to it, but oftentimes, really powerful new tools build their own justification.

As the European Human Brain Project has just shown, nowadays you don’t necessarily need to have concrete, falsifiable hypotheses in your proposal to attract extravagant funding. Often just a mind-blowing demonstration of imaginative power will suffice. Behind the scenes there have been important meetings where these new concepts have been vetted, or at least discussed, to some degree. A recent meeting at Caltech drew representatives from several government agencies, Google, Microsoft, and Qualcomm in attempt to determine what kinds of computing power would be required to process data generated by the BAM. This comes amid recent funding initiatives for exascale scientific computing in other less glamorous, but often touted fields — namely simulation of the weather and the integrity of stored nuclear warheads.

It may be said that neurons, to some extent, already do exactly what Church has proposed. They transduce spike activity naturally within the cell into the expression of genes. Indeed that is how structural, neurological changes that occur hand in hand with new experiences are buttressed — it’s just that the natural process happens much less directly. It may turn out that there isn’t a real need to send data out. Suppose the brain could be expanded to take on new cells capable of interacting with these templates at the level of conscious experience. The extra neurons could read these templates with additional processing machinery or pass them among each other in spikeless communication akin to Zador’s viral transmission method. Neurons don’t normally need to divide and so could be induced to accept additional synthetic chromosomes in the form of these new templates over the long term. Then again, if you can induce a neuron to seamlessly assimilate such DNA machines, you have probably already learned how to control neuron division and differentiation a long time since.

A decade of funding is a long time to support a project if it might be shown within a year or two to be wrongheaded. Church suggests his idea, at least for a worm or a parts of mouse brain, could become a reality in fifteen or so years. That may be optimistic. To some extent the question of the use of DNA in the brain as opposed to the more machine-like componentry of silicon probes and VLSI chips, for example, parallels a more general question in computing and data storage — might DNA-based solutions prevail for a time before more robust elements resistant to the higher temperatures associated with higher speeds take over? A tough question but perhaps we will soon be in a position to choose our answer. With any luck, in a decade’s time, we may be better poised to address many of the intriguing finer points of brain function. In particular we might be able to better address a recent assertion by one Twitter user, who offered the following succinct sentiment — you’re a ghost driving a meat coated skeleton made from stardust, what do you have to be scared of?

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What else would you expect from leader of country which is dedicated to eavesdropping on it’s citizens.

satmatrixx

I agree with you!!!!!!!

Giant Sloar

Its, that should be “What else would you expect from leader of country which is dedicated to eavesdropping on its citizens.”

marvin nubwaxer

ignorant bigot has no idea what you are talking about.

http://www.facebook.com/john.bourne.5876 John Bourne

Well if Odumbo thinks its cool it must be!!!

http://twitter.com/GiorgioJJrgense Giorgio J Jørgensen

Odumbo?

http://www.facebook.com/john.bourne.5876 John Bourne

Yeah our idiot in chief, Oboozle, Ovomit or Obama..

marvin nubwaxer

save your odrama for your omama.

marvin nubwaxer

Does anyone believe a brain scan of a republican would reveal any activity at all or would it appear as if it were a fireworks display of paranoia, delusion and other nonsense?

http://www.facebook.com/john.bourne.5876 John Bourne

Probably show a better scan than a democrats way of believing that you can spend your way to prosperity.

jhewitt123

Did any of you get past the first word in the title? I don’t care who votes this project into getting funded, it is one hell of a good project. But if you insist, I think the best hope for the republican party is to cancel the whole thing, move en masse over to the democratic party and then do their best to try to take it over and vote in someone at least a little more in line with their aspirations for government.

Shawn Thuris

Another great piece from Mr. Hewitt. (Saved to Evernote, along with many others.) Church is a scientific hero but the whole “record spikes to molecular tape and then smuggle out the data somehow” plan sounds pretty cumbersome.

jhewitt123

You’ve hit the nail on the head. To be useful to me at least, I would be interested to have rtBAM, real timeBAM, at least from a few neurons output to the external world or tom other parts of the brain that can use the information.

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